Many Kansas Republicans likely guffawed in disbelief when Governor Laura Kelly recently insisted she was “a major local-control advocate.” The image of Democrats as favoring big government programs, with Republicans fighting to keep government small and local, is deeply entrenched. The language of the state GOP, presenting Kelly’s emergency orders during the pandemic as examples of “one-size-fits-all” overreach, employs this stereotype expertly.
The truth, though, is more complicated. In Kansas, that complexity is further tangled up in the urban/rural divide, with the localities that the Republican majority in Topeka often seems most interested in defending being Kansas’s slowly emptying rural ones, and with attempts at self-governance in Kansas’s growing towns and cities seen as a threat. When Kansas Senator John Doll (R-Garden City) recently commented “I think we [in the legislature] just do so many things to curb the power of the municipal,” his frustration was justified.
This session included two clear examples of this dynamic. First, a bill to prevent Kansas cities and counties from acknowledging popular environmental concerns by banning or taxing plastic bags, which emerged mostly in response to the activism of concerned citizens in Wichita. Second, a bill to prevent Kansas cities and counties from responding to safety and health concerns by issuing municipal IDs to undocumented workers, which emerged mostly in response to a carefully negotiated ordinance passed in Wyandotte County. The vote was close in both cases (though closer in the first than the second), thus potentially allowing Governor Kelly, in contrast to the dominant Republican narrative, to use her veto pen in defense of localism.
Anyone who has spent time watching the patterns of Kansas politics through the frame of our population divide, and how that plays out in shaping the electoral interests of legislators, can’t find all this entirely surprising. Over the past decade and a half there have been many similar conflicts, with most Republican legislators consistently rebuffing the concerns and priorities voiced in Kansas’s (very slowly, but nonetheless surely) liberalizing urban areas. There have been state laws which overturned city efforts to keep their insurance costs low by preserving gun-free zones in municipal buildings, and state decisions which have blocked city efforts to lower or eliminate the criminal penalties attached to medical or recreational marijuana use.
Federalism has always been, and always will be, a messy area of American politics. Calls for “local control” have a mixed history on both sides of the political aisle, and are often more self-interested rather than morally principled. States with legislatures dominated by Democrats don’t necessarily have a better record when it comes to respecting urban democracy. Still, given that Kansas has a literal “Home Rule” provision written into its state constitution, a little more deference and consistency would be nice. (For example, Lawrence passed an ordinance motived by concerns similar to Wyandotte’s with no reaction from the legislature, suggesting that state opposition to local governance is more a matter of political timing than legal interpretation.)
While there is no chance of Kansas losing its historically rural reputation and character, the fact remains that the state’s economic development is mostly in the hands of those few urban parts of the state where the population is growing. The local governments there need a free (or at least a freerer) hand to respond to the interests and beliefs of their citizens. To treat urban Kansans’ efforts on behalf of public health, environmental stewardship, and civic life in the places they live with dismissive inconsistency is no way to keep Kansas’s sunflower blooming.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics in Wichita.